Research Seminars hosted by SPARColl
Professor Billie Giles Corti
The impact of the built environment on physical activity: Work in progress in Perth, Western Australia and lessons to date from RESIDE (June 2007)
Billie Giles-Corti is a Professor in the School of Population Health, The University of Western Australia and currently establishing the Centre for the Built Environment and Health. For more than a decade, she and a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and post-graduate research students at UWA have been studying the impact of the built environment on health and health behaviors including walking, cycling, public transport use, overweight and obesity, social capital and dog walking.
In this talk, Billie gave an overview of her team's work on the built environment and physical activity. In particular, she presented the design and baseline results from RESIDential Environment Project, a 5 year longitudinal study of people moving into new housing developments and discuss some of the methodological issues related to doing a study of this type.
The slides from this talk are available in the reports and publications section of this site.
Professor Neville Owen
‘Understanding and Influencing Sedentary Behaviour' (April 2007)
Neville Owen is Professor of Health Behaviour in the School of Population Health and Director of the Cancer Prevention Research Centre, at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He was previously at Deakin University in Melbourne, as Foundation Professor of Human Movement Science, Head of the School of Human Movement and Director of Research for the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences. His PhD is in experimental psychology, from the University of Western Australia. For most of his working life, he has being involved in studies with epidemiologists, exercise scientists and other public health researchers and social scientists. His research relates to the primary prevention of cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and is focussed on understanding and influencing the environmental and social determinants of behavioural risk factors (particularly physical activity, but also cigarette smoking and sun exposure). It covers building links of behavioural research to basic epidemiology; behavioural measurement; and, the development and evaluation of evidence-based population health interventions. Physical Activity and Behavioral Medicine, a textbook that he wrote with James Sallis, has also been published in a Japanese-language edition. He contributes to service and advisory activities for local, national and international bodies concerned with physical activity, cancer prevention and health promotion.
This talk explained some of the new findings from the national AusDiab survey in Australia, particularly on the deleterious associations of television viewing time with blood glucose and other metabolic attributes related to risk of type 2 diabetes and poor cardiovascular health outcomes; it also dealed with future directions for the behavioural epidemiology group from AusDiab, particularly in building the relevant base of evidence that might lead to future public-health guidelines on sitting time.
The slides from this talk are available in the reports and publications section of this site.
Professor Wendy Brown
'10,000 steps Rockhampton': what did we do and what did we learn? (May 2006)
Wendy Brown is Professor of Physical Activity and Health, University of Queensland, Australia. Her current research interests focus on health promotion and on the prevention and management of chronic illness, from a population health perspective. The current high burden of illness which is attributable to inactivity and overweight in Australia is the major target of her work. To date, much of her research has focussed on women, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who typically have very low levels of physical activity. Measurement of physical activity, and the links between physical activity and all aspects of health and well-being are a strong focus of her work.
Professor Brown is also a principal investigator for the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, which is tracking the health of about 40,000 women from all walks of life in all Australian States and Territories. Her main focus in this study is on issues relating to the role of physical activity and weight management in the prevention and management of chronic disease.
This talk presented data from the Queensland Health-funded, 10,000 Steps Rockhampton project. This study aimed to increase the levels of physical activity in an entire community of ~60,000 people.